where the uniformed and ironed men and and women that look like boys and girls, skin on the face still soft,

wear their gloves and glasses

bad men are winning the imaginary wars they’ve begun so they could win them

Jhosivani put his feet to the ground he slept on this morning

dark toes and light palms

the merry go round Earth

4 kilometers down the wild vein roads cut between

the complete canvas greens where his cousins and father and Uncles cut and culled beauty

to the bus and the sings, where there are, look cheap and weathered but the women are still pretty, he was wise enough to not love them

The politicians are the heroes they will tell you, photos of feeding young Indian women and boys, places they would never go if not for the photograph

Jhosivani has no numbers or cards in banks or machines, he exists because his heart does

his mother still loves him with loud command on the baby city green ride to the schools that might take him somewhere someday

After they cut them down,

People paid attention for a while, they wrote and made videos and sold them

But the wicked came with Bread and Circus

Bread and Circus for the City

pan y circo para el pueblo

Today he is reading stories of revolutions and dignity, the wind blows the page corners through the bus windows

He is adding numbers with his fingers while the taxis turn and the sun crawls from its sleep

He’s the type of boy who looks straight to your eyes, but not through them

He’ll give you a chance

The government is letting the grass grow tall between school and town

On streets named after people they surely would murder

Everybody know the president here is type of man who looks to your eyes but you know his heart is looking somewhere else, he came once after the boys were cut down,

The governor’s men say they shot and burned Jhosivani’s friends, the boys he slept next to and one time, by the whistle trees, sang a song about Christmas

He asks about justice and most of the women he wanted to love disappear

murdered and martyred, he’s gone too

When they shot them up

People paid attention for a while

Until the wicked came

With Bread and Circus

Bread and Circus for the City

All Jhosivani asks, gone now, was for dignity before he grows up

Just that no one forgets dignity can exist

He wants the blood you have be treated as no more precious than the blood that shoots around the veins of the boy on the city bus in Guerrero

The president still flies in his own airplane to meet businessmen and women and drug dealers and the most powerful boys in the world. He takes vacations

And when we worry

People pay attention for a while

Until the wicked come

With Bread and Circus

Bread and Circus for the City

NOTES

Performance April 11, 2015 in Mexico City as part of the festival Ars Futura.

"Intense and Magnificent" - Conexion Rock

Jhosivani Guerrero De La Cruz walked 4 kilometers every morning to catch the bus to the school where he was studying to be a teacher, his dream, in the Mexican state of Guerrero. On September 26, 2014, Jhosivanni was one of 43 students kidnapped and “disappeared” by state police. His family in the ranching community of Omeapa still search for answers.
The world should be a better place.
The music John Medeski and I presented at ArsFutura 2015 is inspired by the life of Jhosivanni Guerrero de La Cruz.
No one should ever know tragedy this wicked.